This video is the result of a research that simulated Darwinian evolution by way of hundreds of virtual creatures – which “live” within a CM-5, a supercomputer elaborated in the 1990s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the process of the experiment, each of these creatures really evolved, learning to execute determined tasks – such as swimming in a simulated aquatic environment.
Artist, scientist and entrepreneur Karl Sims is the founder of Genarts, a North American company that creates special-effects software for the filmmaking industry. He studied computer graphics at MIT and graduated, from the same institute, in life sciences.
A work of web art in which a dynamic model of autonomous agents – in the form of words in a grammatical network – eat each other. In this process, the “bacteria” exchange genetic information and give rise to the emergence of uncommon narratives.
Santiago Ortiz is an artist, mathematician and researcher in the areas of art, science, and fields of representation. He works with techniques of communication, creation and expression that combine narrative and literature as well as digital and architectural spaces.
A community of four robots is oriented by means of facial-pattern-recognition software. This artwork examines the interactive (and not only responsive) potential of robotic elements for engaging in forms of performative and nonverbal communication with the public.
Ruairi Glynn began his career in art as a sculptor. He studied interactive design at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, in London, and at the Institute of Digital Art and Technology, in Plymouth. He is a member of the group Interactive Architecture, of the Bartlett School of Architecture, in London. He studied under English cyberneticist Ranulph Glanville.
A virtual garden whose plant life is composed of six varieties of colorful digital plants. Each one of them evolves according to its “genetic” characteristics and by its interaction with the public who, by means of sensors, cause the flowers to cross-pollinate each other, giving rise to new and unexpected blossoms.
Miguel Chevalier is known as one of the pioneers of digital art. Born in Mexico and residing in France, he graduated from the National Superior School of Fine Arts, in Paris, in the early 1980s. In 1994, he participated as a resident artist at Villa Kujoyama, in Kyoto, Japan.
When the participants type a text on the keys of an old typewriter, they form creatures based on a genetic algorithm that determines their behavior and movement.
Austrian biologist Christa Sommerer and French artist Laurent Mignonneau are professors at the University of Arts and Design in Linz, Austria, where they also head the Department of Culture Interface in the Media Institute.
An evolutionary installation of artificial life, which forms an ecosystem. The agents are cellular automata which interact with each other and with the environment.
Learn more about autonomy and interactivity, two central concepts to the creators of art technology.
Jon McCormack
An Australian artist. He is a senior professor of Computer Science and co-director of the Centre for Electronic Media Art of the University of Monash in Melbourne.
by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (Belgium - France, 1999)
An online interactive editor on which the users fill in a form with messages that in their turn transform into the genetic code of a collective and complex three-dimensional image. This “creature” enters a kind of a virtual herbarium, made up of other filled forms, based on verbs from various messages. Hence the name Verbarium.
Christa Sommerer, biologist born in Belgium, is a researcher at the Telecommunications Advanced Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan. Married to French artist Laurent Mignonneau, partner in her works, she uses principles of genetic engineering to produce beings that do not exist in nature. She is a teacher associated to Advanced Institute of Arts and Mediatic Sciences, Iamas, in Gifu, Japan.
